Sex Education for Latinos : Television: A show attempts to break down cultural taboos so parents can talk frankly with their children. A program in Santa Ana linked to the broadcast reaches out to mothers.

Maria del Rosario Martinez watched soberly as an instructor drew sketches of female sexual organs on a chalkboard.

She and eight other Latino mothers, many with toddlers, listened to explanations of menstruacion, menopausia and reproduccion . They had come to a community group at Carr Intermediate School school to learn more about human sexuality so that they might better instruct their children about the facts of life .

“I never received education about sex,” Martinez said in Spanish through a translator. And she, in turn, never broached the subject with her seven children, the eldest of whom is 23.

Martinez’s situation is not uncommon. Cultural taboos often prevent Latinos, more than others ethnic groups, from openly discussing sex within the family, say producers of “Values, Sexuality and Family,” a public television documentary for Latino parents to help them effectively communicate with their children about sex.

The program, to air Sunday at 7 p.m. on KCET Channel 28 in English and at 10 p.m. on KMEX, Channel 34 in Spanish, was produced by KCET and Sylvan Productions. It features Comadres, an educational program that runs the group Martinez attends in Santa Ana, and others like it in Philadelphia and Miami. (A programming official at KOCE Channel 50, Orange County’s PBS station, said the station plans to air the documentary “eventually” but said that it won’t be shown Sunday because officials weren’t aware of the show far enough ahead of time.)

“(Latino) parents may think if they talk about sex, they are promoting it or encouraging a child to do it, so it’s best not to talk about it,” “Values” director Sylvia Morales said recently.

“There’s also a double standard that is so strong in Latino culture,” she explained. “It’s acceptable for men to have sex--that’s what men do. But a woman is expected to be virginal. Contradictions like this make things very difficult.”

But the need for frank communication, regardless of parents’ stance on premarital sex, is critical, Morales said. Latino youths between 13 and 19 make up about 9% of the nation’s population but represent nearly 18% of AIDS cases, narrator Teresa Rodriguez reports. In addition, teen-age pregnancy among Latinos is markedly higher than among Anglos, Rodriguez says.

Funded by a grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the documentary was made to complement the center’s national AIDS prevention campaign, America Responds to AIDS. It was also prompted by response to “SIDA Is AIDS,” a 1988 co-production of KCET and Morales’ Sylvan Productions. (SIDA is the Spanish acronym for AIDS.)

That program, which outlined the gravity of the epidemic among Latinos, drew requests for more information, said Morales, who speaks with heated urgency and concern about the particular threat of AIDS in the Latino community.

“After ‘SIDA’ aired, a lot of people wanted to know, ‘How do we talk to our children about this?’ ” she said.

To answer that question, “Values” producers turned to the National Coalition of Hispanic Health and Human Services Organizations, which had designed an educational program to help parents communicate with their children about sex.

The coalition’s program identified tools or “values” crucial to family communication, such as trust, mutual respect between parents and children, good listening and self-esteem. Ways to build and use such values form the heart of the documentary.

Nydia Soto, a young mother interviewed in Philadelphia for the documentary, talks of how she learned that respect must work both ways. “While I was demanding respect, I wasn’t respecting (my daughter) with my yelling and things. . . . Now I talk to her.”

In a scene staged for the KCET show, a father listens to the “unspoken feelings” behind his child’s words. When his son makes a hostile remark, the father honestly explains the painful situation that prompted the remark: The boy must move far away to his mother’s house because his parents are divorcing and his father can’t take care of the boy alone.

Members of a Comadres group are told that learning English will help them gain greater self-esteem--and thus enable them to instill confidence in their children.

“Parents may come to this country feeling low self-esteem because they don’t know the language and people assume when you don’t speak English, you’re stupid,” Morales said. “One of the most compelling statistics (in the documentary) is that adolescents who felt loved by their parents had sex (for the first time) later in life.”

“Values, Sexuality and the Family,” to be shown nationwide on selected PBS stations in English and on selected Univision stations in Spanish, was designed to reach and benefit a wide range of Latinos, producers said.

Interviewed individually or videotaped in their community groups are members of three large Latino sub-groups: Cubans in Miami, Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia and Mexican-Americans in Southern California.

“We tried to get people everyone can relate to,” said Morales, who co-produced and co-wrote the documentary with Jean Victor. “These are neighborhood folk; working class to poor.”

In addition, narrator Rodriguez suggests that viewers contact local agencies or health professionals for further information, and gives a toll-free number for a bilingual AIDS hot line sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control.

Morales said, however, that the program it is just “one tiny little step” toward its goal; that it takes families more than 30 minutes in front of a TV set to build self-esteem, respect, trust and good communication, and that first attempts to break down entrenched cultural mores may not be easy.

“I see the program as just an invitation,” she said. “We are opening the door and saying, ‘Look, these are things that are available to you and there are places you can go to find out more about this.’ And, of course, the important thing being you must find out because there are high stakes here.”

“Values, Sexuality and Family” airs Sunday at 7 p.m. on KCET Channel 28 in English and at 10 p.m. on KMEX Channel 34 in Spanish.